This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1851 edition. Excerpt: ... should, properly, have been no class in New York--at least none that could afford the price of attendance--that was not proportionately represented at that Concert. The songstress, herself, as is easy to see, prefers to be the 'People's choice, ' and would rather sing to the Fifty Thousand than to the Five Hundred--but she touches a chord that should vibrate far deeper than the distinctions of society, and I hope yet to see her as much 'the fashion T as 'the popular rage' in our republican metropolis. "Jenny's first coming upon the stage at the Concert has been described by every critic. Several of them have pronounced it done rather awkwardly. It seemed to me, however, that the language of curtsies was never before so varied--never before so eloquently effective. She expressed more than the three degrees of humility--profound, profounder, profoundest--more than the three degrees of simplicity--simple, simpler, simplest. In the impression she produced, there was conviction of the superlative of both, and something to spare. Who, of the spectators that remembered Steffanoni's superb indifference to the public--(expressed by curtsies just as low when making her first appearance to sing the very solo that Jenny was about to sing)--did not recognize, at Castle Garden, that night, the eloquent inspiration there might be, if not the excessive art, in a curtsy on the stage? I may as well record, for the satisfaction of the great Good-as-you--(the ' Casta Diva' of our country)--that Jenny's reverence to this our divinity, the other night, was not practised before kings and Courts. I was particularly struck, in Germany, with the reluctant civility expressed by her curtsies to the box of the Sovereign Grand Duke, and to the audience of nobles and...

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Was there opera - and just what was it like - in New York City before the advent of the Metropolitan Opera Company? In exploring these questions, Karen Ahlquist describes the social, cultural, economic, and esthetic factors that led to the assimilation of Italian opera - a complex, expensive genre of elitist reputation - into New York's business oriented community, with its English cultural heritage and sacred republican traditions. In her lively description of opera as few today can imagine it, Ahlquist considers Jacksonian-era efforts to create a polite social setting, the influence of a socially based clash between respectability and broad public access, and the role of music in shaping, not just reflecting, social and cultural life.